Randy Blythe | The Bad Penny (beta)

Archive for Randy Blythe

The Bad Penny’s Top 10 Music Books of 2025

Posted in Features, Lists, What You Readin' For? with tags Die Kreuzen, Elvis Presley, Faith No More, Joni Mitchell, Neko Case, Ozzy Osbourne, Patti Smith, Paul McCartney, Randy Blythe, Roddy Bottum on 11/19/2025 by Kurt Orzeck

Most music fans can’t read music. But they can read about music – the larger-than-life personalities, the history of various genres, the often-times truth-is-stranger-than-fiction dynamics that keep one of the entertainment industry’s least profitable yet universally beloved pillars standing.

For the first time ever, The Bad Penny shares what we consider to be the most essential nonfiction books about music that came out in a year during which citizens across the country tolerated book bans and censorship in Authoritarian America. Mark these words: What happened this year and is still happening in libraries and schools in the U.S. will go down as one of the most shameful “chapters” in this country’s history.

Read whatever books you want to read, and enjoy doing so, because in this unpredictable hellscape, who knows what rights we might lose next.

1. Patti Smith – Bread of Angels: A Memoir (McNally Jackson)

Buy here.

Continue reading →

On Tyranny: ‘People in America Have Blinders On,’ Lamb of God’s Randy Blythe Says

Posted in Features, Interviews, On Tyranny with tags Lamb of God, Randy Blythe on 02/25/2025 by Kurt Orzeck

As part of The Bad Penny‘s new series called On Tyranny and focusing on how artists deal with living under authoritarian regimes, we’re dusting off an interview with Lamb of God frontman Randy Blythe conducted on December 23, 2007.

At the time, Blythe—known more as a deviant class clown than a philosopher—was one of the only vocalists in metal or punk screaming unabashedly about the Gulf war and the crimes of George W. Bush.

Check out the prescient words of one of metal’s greatest frontman in this interview, originally published in unparalleled graphic novel/ rock magazine Royal Flush and now presented online for the first time.